“I don’t. But I’m telling you plain there’s something else here. I don’t know what it is. And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. But it’s here.”
I nodded. “Lady Werewilk, if it’s true there’s something worthy of a sorcerer’s attention in the old Faery Ring, you’ve got to at least consider the possibility that it’s influencing your artists. It wouldn’t be the first time something old or something Elvish gave people close to it nightmares or visions.”
“And now you believe it’s expressing an interest in oil paintings of the School of Realism?”
I shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger things, Lady.”
Her expression told me plainly the she hadn’t, and she doubted that I had.
“Look. Forget what might be buried under the Faery Ring. Forget what it might or might not be doing to your painters. The fact remains that someone who’s proven they’re willing to kill-more than once-may be sneaking toward your door. And I say the only way to stop that is to get the Regency involved.”
Lady Werewilk deflated.
“On that, Mr. Markhat, I’m afraid we agree.”
Gertriss spoke. “Is it too late to send somebody back to Rannit now?”
I’d dreaded this discussion. “We can’t send just anybody. It’ll have to be me. And I’m going alone. On foot. No horse, no stable boys.” I looked Gertriss in the eye to let her know I meant no assistants too.
“Look. I can march into House Avalante and have a chat with a halfdead named Evis. Evis has pull. An hour after I speak to him, he can have the Regent’s top archeologist sitting in his office. I can wave a few maps around and make mention of unauthorized artifact hunts and I’d bet my favorite boots we’ll be headed back here an hour after that with fifty troops and a pair of Regency sorcerers, with another two hundred men on the road by daybreak. Without Evis and Avalante, all that could take days. Maybe a week. And that’s just too long to take chances.”
“Alone? Are you crazy, er, boss?”
“I can move faster and a lot quieter by myself. It’s maybe fifteen miles to Rannit. I can do that on foot in seven hours, even moving slow and keeping the noise down. I can stay off the road. If no one here knows I’m gone, well, I should be perfectly safe.”
I wasn’t convincing anyone. But I reminded myself that as the boss I didn’t need to convince Gertriss. And Lady Werewilk might not like it, but she was biting her lip and being quiet.
“So it’s settled. I’ll sneak out right after breakfast. Dawn is a good time for sneaking. Anybody asks, I’m up in my room, pondering my misspent youth.”
Gertriss opened her mouth. I prepared myself for a tirade, having recognized the slight creasing of her forehead and the way she made her hands into fists from Mama’s similar habits.
At that moment, though, Buttercup let loose a long, plaintive cry from somewhere out in Lady Werewilk’s overgrown lawn.
We all bolted for the door. Artists and staff were already in the hall, on the move, though every one of them stopped well before the doors.
Buttercup’s howl rose up and up, growing louder and clearer with every passing moment. Gertriss brandished her new sword, but I put the blade down with the palm of my hand.
“No need for that, Miss,” I said. My words barely rose above the banshee’s wail. “I don’t think she means us any harm.”
I reached the door. I had my hand on the latch when Buttercup’s cry rose sharply and took on a certain unmistakable urgency.
I opened the door, poked my head just around it.
There was no Moon. The torches on either side of the doors illuminated a semicircle of weeds and cracked flagstones, but only for a weak stone’s throw. Beyond that was shadow and forest and night.
One moment, shadow and forest.
Blink.
The next, shadow and forest and Buttercup, at the edge of the lawn. She was wild-eyed, and her hair swirled around her as though she’d just paused in the midst of a spinning dance step.
Her right hand moved, the motion so fast it was only a blur.
When I could see her hand again, it held a crossbow bolt. A black one, twin to the one I’d pried from my boot.
Blink. Buttercup and bolt were gone.
But from the trees came the sound of horses. Fast cavalry mounts, not any of Lady Werewilk’s plodding mules.
“Stay put.” I pulled Toadsticker from my belt. I expected Gertriss to argue, but she just nodded and took the door. “Douse the lights so you don’t make a good target. Get ready to open the door if I need inside in hurry.”
And then I was on the move.
I wish I could say I glided ghostlike from shadow to shadow. Truth is, I was too full of roast beef to do much more than shuffle and grunt. But I managed to shuffle my way across the Werewilk lawn without being seen or shot.
The crape myrtle in which I’d left the blanket and corn bread was empty. I hid myself beneath it, taking advantage of the weeds and the moonless night. The horses were close, still running at a suicidal gallop through thick forest, and I wondered just what kind of madmen they bore.
Buttercup cried out again, from just inside the trees. I saw a hint of motion, wild hair in the starlight, and then she was gone, but the horses were nearly on top of us.
The first of the horsemen broke from the trees.
I very nearly failed to bite back a curse word.
Black mare. Black saddle. Rider small and slight, swathed in black robes, black hood, black sleeves and gloves and boots. Had there been daylight, I might have glimpsed the black mask he wore, with its careful slit for the eyes.
A sorcerer. Worse, a sorcerer who’d sidestepped the arduous and expensive process of being vetted and named by Rannit’s established sorcerous corps.
Which made him a doubly dangerous man, in that his life was already forfeit by law and the ire of beings like Encorla Hisvin and all the other monsters who had survived the War.
He held a staff. Atop it was a glowing blue globe that hissed and sparked.
Buttercup howled, appeared maybe fifty feet from the horseman, and did that odd little side-step that had been, until then, the very last thing I saw her do before she vanished.
This time, though, she fell.
The sorcerer bore down on her, calling out to his comrades, who were so close to the tree line I could hear the strained breathing of their mounts.
She rose, but the blue light played oddly about her, and she struggled and fell again, as though fighting her way through a briar-patch.
She looked back at me. She wasn’t howling anymore. She was screaming, but it was just a scream, with none of the volume of her eerie howls.
I cussed and charged out of the myrtle tree, Toadsticker held low, my supper weighing me down like a belt made of stones.
I’d never reach the sorcerer in time. I knew that. He’d be able to run Buttercup down half a dozen times before I huffed and puffed half the way to him.
And to make matters suddenly worse, four other black-clad sorcerers burst from the trees. Each carried a glowing staff similar to that of the first. When the light from them all fell over Buttercup, her scream fell to a whimper and she sank to her belly and pulled my plain grey blanket over her and began to cry.
The first sorcerer reached her, pulled to a halt, and kept his staff over her huddled form. He barked something to the others, and they turned their black mounts to face me.
I stopped. I went quiet. I was too far from the Werewilk house to make a run for it and too far from the woods to escape there either.
I was in the middle of a patch of knee-high weeds with a short sword, facing five outlaw sorcerers armed with the kind of nasty that only outlaw sorcerers can offer.
Crickets sang. Horses shuffled. The rogue sorcerers sat and stared. One chuckled and muttered something unintelligible to his fellows.
